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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 16 2020, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the whole-lotta-changes-coming dept.

Bigger than big: Linux kernel colonel Torvalds claims 5.8 is 'one of our biggest releases of all time':

All going well, the stable release should appear sometime in August.

Introducing the release candidate, Torvalds said it was "right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits." That said, the 4.9 kernel was "artificially big" because of a couple of special factors, whereas 5.8 is a "more comprehensive release."

Torvalds said: "The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work." He added: "We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development."

While the code for the kernel is large, only a small part of it ends up in any individual system, since the kernel source contains code for every chip architecture and hardware it supports. In early 2018, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that "an average laptop uses around 2 million lines of kernel from 5,000 files to function properly." At the time, there were 25 million lines of code in the kernel, whereas now there are over 28 million.

See also: Linux 5.8 Kernel Features Include New Intel/AMD Capabilities, Security Improvements, Optimizations.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:17PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday June 17 2020, @12:17PM (#1009081) Journal

    It's based on the Linux kernel, at least.

    The future may look different. There will probably be another attempt to merge smartphone and desktop experiences. Why not run Linux applications on a docked smartphone? Smartphones are coming out with 16 GB of RAM, probably more within the next few years, might as well use it for something.

    Google's Chrome OS supports Android and Linux applications, and is now making its way onto tablets like the Lenovo Duet. Their upcoming (?) Fuchsia OS [wikipedia.org] could do the same, although it will be based on a new kernel.

    https://www.osnews.com/story/131858/google-details-fuchsia-states-it-is-not-experimental/ [osnews.com]

    Smartphone manufacturers are wary of giving Google more power, but they can go their own way, like Samsung with DeX for docking or Tizen for an OS alternative.

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